Magnetic storage systems, such as hard disk drives, are used to store large amounts of information on tracks, such as the circularly-arranged, adjacent tracks of a magnetic disk. A magnetic head in a magnetic storage system typically includes a read/write transducer for storing magnetically encoded information on, and later retrieving that information from, a magnetic recording medium, such as a disk.
Because a magnetic recording head typically provides a strong writing field to achieve a high areal density, the writer may cause interference in adjacent tracks on the disk when writing to an intended track. This interference may result in the erasure of information previously written to adjacent tracks. The so-called adjacent-track interference may be particularly problematic as designers increase the number of tracks per inch and/or reduce the track pitch to increase the areal density of magnetic recording media.
Therefore, there is an ongoing need to design magnetic recording heads with improved adjacent-track-interference characteristics.